A Reader’s Guide to Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. JOHN 5:39

Bonhoeffer’s writings, and their English translations, are in copyright, and none of them is in the Ochorus library. They are widely available from their publishers. The standard scholarly edition in English is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, published by Fortress Press in seventeen volumes, with careful introductions and notes; older translations of the best-known books remain in print and are perfectly usable for ordinary reading. What follows is a guide arranged for usefulness rather than chronology.

Begin here

Life Together (1939). The best place to start. Short, practical and searching, written out of the common life at Finkenwalde. Read it slowly, a chapter at a time, and let it examine your own congregation and your own heart.

Discipleship (1937), long known in English as The Cost of Discipleship. His most famous book. Read the opening chapters on costly grace and the call to follow, then the exposition of the Sermon on the Mount. The second part, on the church, is less read and worth the effort.

Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible (1940). A very short book, and a fine introduction to praying the Psalms.

The prison years

Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge. Letters, poems and fragments from Tegel and after, first published in the 1950s. Moving and unsettling. Read it whole rather than in quotations, and read the letters about religionless Christianity alongside those about prayer and the secret discipline.

The letters he exchanged with Maria von Wedemeyer, published in English in the 1990s as Love Letters from Cell 92, show a more personal side of him.

For deeper study

Ethics. The unfinished book he regarded as his main work, gathered from fragments after his death. Demanding, and essential for understanding his thinking on responsibility and on the conspiracy.

Sanctorum Communio. His doctoral dissertation on the church. Difficult, but the source of his teaching that the church is Christ existing as community.

Creation and Fall. Lectures on the opening chapters of Genesis, given in Berlin in 1932–33. Fresh and theological rather than technical.

Christ the Center, also published as Christology. His 1933 lectures on the person of Christ, reconstructed from students’ notes. Short and dense.

Approach with care

The prison fragments on a world come of age and a religionless Christianity were unfinished thoughts. They have been quoted in support of positions — including a Christianity without a personal God — that his life and other writings contradict. Read them in the context of the whole man.

Be careful also with quotations attributed to him online and in popular books. Several of the best known are not his.

About Bonhoeffer

Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary. The standard biography, by his closest friend and the editor of his letters. Long, detailed and indispensable.

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906–1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance. A shorter, reliable modern life.

Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2014). A well-researched and humane biography, attentive to his inner life.

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2010). Popular and widely read, especially among evangelicals. Many scholars have criticised it for presenting him in terms closer to modern evangelicalism than the record allows; read it, if at all, alongside one of the others.

Reggie L. Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus (2014). On the influence of the Harlem church on his life and thought.

Reading more than one of these is wise. Bonhoeffer has been claimed by many camps, and no single account is disinterested.

Three counsels for reading him

Read him with the Bible open. He would have insisted on it. His own authority was always Scripture, and his books are meant to send you back to it.

Read him whole. Do not take only the Bonhoeffer your tradition prefers — the evangelical of Discipleship or the radical of the prison letters. They are the same man.

Read him to obey. He had little patience with knowledge that never became action. A page read and acted upon is worth more than a volume admired.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. COLOSSIANS 3:16